Encountering Debian distribution

[Richard Tietjen <rtietjen@kale.connix.com>]

I recently decided to give the Debian R.93 (I think that's the number)
distribution a try, after hours of frustration with a couple of other
Linux distributions, including Caldera.  I was so pleased when Debian
installed smoothly and sensibly (I only installed the basedisk setup).
As a result of that happy experience, I want to know more about the
distribution; I think I'd like to adopt it.  

Is there a FAQ?  When is a final distribution expected?  When the CD
available is from FSF or elsewhere, will it support big EIDE drives?
Will "IDE" CD drives be supported (this was one area where I had so
much trouble with the other distributions, I have a new DELL XMT,
maybe too new)?  I'll probably download or get the InfoMagic disks for
the complete .93 distribution, and finish installing it from a DOS
partition; should I instead wait for the real release?  Is
the documentation available in TeXinfo format for printing?

Is the absence of MAN on the basedisk installation a bug that I should
attempt to report formally?  

I also seek clarification on the expert installation's recommendations
on disk partitioning.  There are something like 10 directories off the
root.  The web page makes no mention of /tmp, /boot, etc.  Should I
just infer that the recommended procedure is one partition for each of
those directories, plus one for /usr/local?  That seems like a lot of
partitions. 

Thanks.